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Introduction

When pop singer Britney Spears entertained a 55-hour
Las Vegas marriage in 2004, this is where it ended: the
Clark County Family Courts and Services Center in Las Vegas.

The
wedding was a Vegas classic, with vows exchanged in the
early morning hours amid
implications of alcohol and impaired judgment.
The union was obviously bad for business, and
someone must have conveyed this to Spears in the hours that
followed. On Monday morning, her lawyer came to Family Court
to file an annulment on her behalf, accompanied by the
paparazzi. The marriage was dissolved as quickly as it was
made, and the Oops-I-Did-It-Again girl can now claim legally
that it never happened.

Although it is miles from the Strip, the Family Services
Center is an important safety valve for our treasured
tourists. If you wake up in the morning, broke, hung-over
and accidentally married, it is good to know that you can
visit the Self-Help Center for the appropriate form, claim
temporary insanity, and at least erase that last part.
Thereby, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,"™ and
you are free to come back later and do it all over again.

Annulments are just one of the many "Family Services"
offered here. The term, of course, is a bureaucratic
euphemism for less cheerful proceedings.
Truth-in-advertising would call it the "Clark County Family
Catastrophe and Damage Control Center." When marriages
fail, families explode, kids go ballistic and parents get
high, this is the place where government steps in and tries
to pick up the pieces.

I must emphasize from the beginning that government is not
well suited to this task. If you are experiencing
difficulties in a romantic or parental relationship, the
last thing you want is Clark County to become your
counselor. The Family Court, like the rest of the legal
system, can only solve problems with sledgehammers. Once the
statutes, filings, lawyers and liabilities kick in, there is
very little room for subtle and creative solutions.

Divorcing couples who cannot agree on child custody will see
their kid divided somewhere down the middle, a laSolomon. Parents who are accused of abusing their
kids may find themselves condemned to a seemingly endless
nightmare of counseling, evaluations, testing and court
hearings while their kids are held in limbo in an
undisclosed location. Even becoming a foster parent  a
good guy in the eyes of the system  opens you up to
countless state regulations and intrusions into your
privacy. There will always be something ironic and Big
Brotherish about the term "Family Services." These are
services that you don't want your family to ever need.

People shouldn't have to work out their conflicts in a place
like this. They should learn to love one another and just
get along. The only reason you need Family Services is
because, frankly, one or more parties is crazy. You may not
be able to tell it by looking at them, but if you get to
know the participants in any contested case, you will
probably see that at least one of them is irrational and
infinitely destructive and can only be stopped by a court
ruling and firm legal enforcement.

The Family Services
complex is a de facto mental health treatment
facility for Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Borderline
Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder,
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, drug addiction, alcohol
addiction, gambling addiction, and a lot of other profound
emotional disorders that don't yet have names. The court
system is not well-equipped to handle these problems, but at
least decisions are made and conflicts are eventually
resolved in some surgical manner.

Addictions and mental illnesses permeate this place, but
none is more pervasive (and absorbs more court resources)
than that special affliction called romantic love. Ah,
love! It's a heightening of the senses, an eruption of
passions, a joining of two hearts, dancing in the rain,
breakfast in bed, a dozen red roses, springtime in Paris.... In
other words, it's an exquisite delusion that can't possibly
live up to the victim's expectations.

Love is a suspension
of critical judgment that allows a person to become
passionately attached to a mannequin or hopeless cad who
they would have nothing to do with if not for certain sexual
cues. If you are going to fall "madly" in love, it follows
almost as a law of physics that you will eventually fall
just as madly out of love, and when that time comes, the
Family Services Center is here to serve you.

The complex, occupying a large portion of a city block,
provides one-stop shopping for all of your dysfunctional
family needs. The most obvious facility is the Family
Court, a modern three-story office building that houses
18 courtrooms concerned with divorce and child support,
restraining orders, juvenile justice, and child abuse and
neglect. (Marriage licenses are not issued here but are
still handled in the big courthouse downtown, closer to the
"action.")

Behind the court building is the Juvenile
Detention Center  or "Juvvie" to kids who want to
sound tough  where your young miscreants are housed in
a prison-like setting.

Just beyond Juvvie is quite a
different facility, Child Haven  or "Child
Heaven" to some of the younger kids. This is a cluster of
home-like "cottages" managed by a caring staff where
children who have been taken from their parents due to abuse
or neglect are temporarily housed and schooled.

Child Haven and Juvvie couldn't be more different  one
warm and welcoming, even if firmly structured, and the other
cold, stern and antiseptic. Separating the two is a
chain-link fence topped by barbed wire. It's a fine line
between Child Heaven and Child Hell, and there are times
when a kid could end up at either one, depending on not much
more than chance.

As a former foster parent, former divorce litigant and
former acting patriarch of a troubled family, I have visited
this complex way too often. I can confirm that this is a
place of great pain, most of it hidden just out of view.
Occasionally, coming here was filled with joy, but more
often it felt more like chemotherapy, where doctors fill
your bloodstream with poison in a crude and often
ineffective attempt to kill a cancer. After a couple of
sessions of chemo, you don't want to go back, and even just
driving by the building fills you with dread.

Now I have returned here as a ghost, wandering the halls and
rattling my chains in search of peace. I step into
courtrooms unannounced and listen to the proceedings. I
strike up conversations with people in the hallways and ask
them questions about what is going on. I don't want to be a
victim of my past but the ruler of it, and to do this I need
to understand this place that I fear.

I am seeking some kind
of internal balance, much like adult victims of childhood
sexual abuse are drawn to become prostitutes and strippers
(or "sex workers" in the terminology of Las Vegas): It is a
way to master something that you had little control over the
first time around.

I suppose you could call me a journalist, conducting
investigations and reporting to you what I find, but I don't
pretend to be neutral. I now know the difference between
Good and Evil, and both can be found here,
sometimes one in the guise of the other. I am not reluctant
to evaluate what I see and speculate about the hidden cause
of things.

The mainstream media, both local and national,
swoops in from time to time, reporting on high profile cases
and the most obvious problems of the system, but they don't
stay long. Their coverage is dominated by soundbites and
stereotypical human interest stories: citizen victimized by
an overzealous government, citizen neglected by an
inattentive government, citizen demanding that government be
changed while not actually doing anything to make it happen.

Inevitably, the
media reports that the court and family services systems are "in
crisis," but that's nothing new. (Hey, we're all in crisis.)
Occasionally, there are thoughtful stories in the newspaper,
but they easily get swept away by a tsunami like Britney.
You know the truth is in trouble when they call in the News
Choppers  as in, "This is News Chopper 9 reporting
live from above the Family Court building where the
marriage of Britney Jean Spears and Jason Allan Alexander
has just been annulled." Whatever kind of journalist I may
be, I am not a News Chopper.

In the testimony I am about to give, I solemnly swear to
tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so
help me God. This oath is subject, however, to
certain philosophical dilemmas, such as "What is truth,
anyway?" and "Is there really a God?" Furthermore, I don't
think you really want the whole truth, because that
would be exceedingly tedious and involve a great deal of
paperwork and redundant testimony. Instead, I will give you
my impressions of the truth based on the best of my
memory and what strikes me as important at the time.

Hard-core journalists often go to the scene of wars and
famines to report from the front lines on the tragedy and
human suffering found there. I choose to travel to the
Family Services Center in East Las Vegas. People don't kill
each other here, but you feel a similar sense of despair
whenever you scratch the surface and understand what is
really going on. In most of the cases involving children,
the kids have been repeatedly betrayed by the adults who are
supposed to be protecting them. After their court date,
most of them will go back to the same degrading
circumstances they came from, and there isn't much that
anyone can do about it.

We're not talking about a few
isolated tragedies, but whole truckloads of it wherever you
choose to look. Processing the worst family dysfunction of
a city of over a million, this facility is a wholesale
transit point for tragedy  a sort of regional
Wal-Mart distribution center for trauma and despair.

I come here because I want to understand human suffering,
not just in Las Vegas but everywhere in the world. I am
also trying to figure out what my own role should be in
helping those in need. If there is some innocent child
being cruelly damaged somewhere, do I have a responsibility
to try to save them? Where does my responsibility begin and
end?

I am not claiming that the plight of an abused kid in
Las Vegas is worse than that of, say, a street orphan forced
into prostitution in Bombay or a destitute Guatemalan family
making the desperate journey across Mexico to try to find
work in the U.S. It is all the same suffering: an exquisite
combination of dread and aloneness that devastates people's
personalities. The world says, "You are worthless," but
still you refuse to die. Instead, you take refuge in some
clever self-deception, a twisted delusion about yourself or
the world that permits you to keep your self-esteem even if
it loosens your grip on reality.

The fact is, I come to the Family Services Center because it
is convenient. In Las Vegas, unlike India or Mexico, the
water is safe to drink, and you are never very far from a
good buffet. (Do I look like Mother Theresa?) The
complex itself is safe and structured. Thanks to the
heavy security, I am not going to be
robbed or killed here, and the rules that govern this place
are reliable and understandable.

This is my
courthouse, and I have a citizen's right to be here, while I
don't have the right to intrude into people's homes as they
pummel and demean each other. The Family Services Complex
is a comfortable place to collect data on the brutal world
outside. Then, if the circumstances are appropriate, I can
make field trips into the real world to explore the conflict
behind a court case and what it means for the rest of
humanity.

To most of the clients who enter it, the Family Services
Center is a place of quiet agony and seemingly
indecipherable bureaucracy separating them from freedom. To
those who work here, however, it's just a job, no more
depressing in itself than working in a hospital. Everyone
knows their role, has their friendly clique of coworkers and
quickly stops seeing most of the suffering of the clientele.

County employees and other court regulars have their senses
dulled by another ghost wandering these halls, the beautiful
and seductive Anesthesia. As light and invisible as
the wind, she slips silently into courtrooms and offices and
sprinkles pixy dust into people's coffee.

Anesthesia makes
sure that you don't look any deeper into a particular case
than your immediate job requires. She keeps you busy with
meaningless activities, like raising houseplants or doing
crossword puzzles, and makes you think that the rest of the
world is doing just fine. She assures you that there is
nothing to worry about: As long as you perform your assigned
microscopic task, someone else will see the big picture and
take care of the rest.

Anesthesia and I were married once, but we got a divorce.
From time to time, she calls to me, tempting me with sweet
oblivion, but I can't go back. Once you see beyond the happy
facade of the world to the intimate destruction that flows
just below the surface, it is hard to put the demons back in
the box. I don't wanna do that drug no more: Anesthesia. I
want to see things as they really are.

Footnotes and Links

Note: Most of the photos on this website have something
linked to them. Click them to find out what.

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